Europan 14 : Amsterdam Sluisbuurt

An interface between two worlds

The Sluisbuurt’s district is an interface between two worlds: the urban one and the rural one. Surrounded by water, it is the perfect place to integrate the potentials of both, and to create a harmony at very different scales: city scale, urban cluster scale, cell scale.
The project is an interface where the urban meets the rural world through productive and collective places, shops directly linking the consumers to the producer, spaces of exchange and mutual assistance. Together these spaces provide the indispensable fabric to support social bonds in the district.

Urban puff pastry

The project is structured in active layers.

First comes an artificial topography, which hides car and bike parking on the inside, as a mini-neighbourhood exchanger, and gathers pedestrian walkways, sports and games areas, shops, orchards, workshops, and access to the upper layers on the outside. The ambulation enables to go on different levels. Directly linked to the topography, duplexes integrate tertiary and workshop spaces, co-working offices with their own lodge.

On top of this layer, a stratum of productive residential is laid, with productive areas in the circulations: common orchards, greenhouses shared between two apartments and private productive areas. Different residential and productive typologies are intermingled and complete the urban fabric of high density. The productive puff pastry is crowned by a last green and productive stratum: the rooftops, with vegetation covers, outdoor playgrounds, greenhouses and photovoltaic panels.

Productive typologies

The differently proposed typologies integrate collective, shared and individual productive spaces in housing. The three types are following the same ideas: modulable private units, forming multiple apartments, collective multifunctional areas, all organized around a structural central core that gathers all the vertical flows. As a productive and commercial interface to the city, co-working and shops that link local producers and consumers.